Scott Hanselman recently blogged about backups. Jeff Atwood recently blogged about security. Often times those things go hand-in-hand. So here’s how I do things:

• I use TrueCrypt to encrypt my flash drive as well as other important data. TrueCrypt is easy to use, secure and free. There’s no reason not to use it.
• I don’t run as administrator… most of the time. After installing TrueCrypt, I can use my TrueCrypt Traveller disk as a non-privileged user and it works fine. The only machine that I still run as an admin is my Snapstream Beyond TV box, but I rarely get on the console to do anything anyway. All the rest of my machines are running with non-privileged accounts.
• I use the No Script FireFox plugin. This is a whitelist/blacklist style plugin so any sites I haven’t explicitly allowed don’t get to run their scripts. And we all know how bad scripting is now.
• My household stores all our data in one NAS device. We don’t have some data here and some data there. It’s all on the NAS. This is really convenient when reformatting any of the PCs since I don’t need to save off any data first. Also, when backing up I just need to backup this one device and I’m done.
• I store my backups off-site. I have an external USB hard drive that I bring home once every couple months. I put the data into a handful of TrueCrypt volume files, copy it to the drive, then bring it back to work.
• I don’t use Anti-virus. It’s slow, it barely works and when it does work, it’s only for known viruses. But when I do need to scan something I just upload it into a new mail in Yahoo as an attachment and Yahoo scans it for me. Bam, virus scanner on demand.
• I don’t use virtual machines. Not because I don’t want to, but because you need to buy an additional license for your OS to use it in a VM. This may not be an issue for you open source guys, but it is for us who use Windows… and it ain’t cheap.

So there’s my grand strategy. What yours?